Teaching Practices

A flipped classroom approach

I first heard about the flipped classroom approach (Mazur, 1997, Bergmann & Sams, 2012) from my PhD supervisor, Prof. Bruce Bassett, when he was teaching a postgraduate course on observational cosmology. I immediately liked the approach and so when I began teaching, it seemed a natural approach that fit my practical courses extremely well. I chose to flip my classes for two main reasons: firstly my students have a range of experience with programming, a core skill in my courses, which means the usual issues of pacing are exacerbated where many students will be lost during lectures and many others will be bored. The current approach allows students to learn at their own pace. The second reason is that I believe computational physics is largely skills based and best learned by doing, not listening to lectures. Thus I reserve all interaction time with students for discussions, interactive quizzes, answering questions and then allowing them to work through the practicals with support from myself and tutors.  This blended approach aligns well with UWC's Flexible Learning and Teaching Provisioning Policy (2021) Section 4.1.

Constructive and authentic practicals

When developing my courses, I aim to give my students an authentic learning experience. I chose to align teaching and assessment with the course objectives by combining teaching resources, problem solving and assessment together into practicals. Below I show a pdf of one of the Honours practicals which aims to develop understanding of Monte Carlo methods, used extensively in many physics research fields. Resources are provided as required with questions based on those resources. Students also receive problems that help them develop their programming skills, critical thinking and physics problem solving. During class, I will demonstrate example problems and assist students while they work on the practicals. Students are encouraged to help each other and discuss the problems, after attempting them on their own. This leads to a congenial and collaborative work environment during the practical sessions. The assessment aspect of these practicals is further discussed in Assessment Practices. 

Research-based learning

I was fascinated by research-based learning when I first encountered it in the Towards Professionalisation of Learning and Teaching course. I particularly liked the idea of students actively participating in research. While I base several problems on my own work in astronomy, I have not yet made the leap to incorporating students in a research program. I would like to start shifting towards including "mini-projects" in my course, allowing students more freedom in applying the concepts taught in the course, especially with a focus on astronomical data analysis, which I obviously have experience in. 

I frequently view the PHY322 practical course as a smaller version of the Honours course. Although this course is very short and I did not see much room for a research project, I decided to incorporate research-based learning in the form of an optional programming competition, similar to the one that so inspired me in my undergraduate (see "Teaching Influences" on the Teaching Philosophy  page). By making it optional but incentivising it with small prizes, my hope is that many students of all experience levels will participate. I again tried to make this experience authentic in two ways. Firstly by allowing students to choose a topic that interests them and aligns with their anticipated career choice. Secondly by getting them to submit their competition entry in a publicly-available online form (such as on github.com) which I have told them will form part of their own public portfolio. Both potential physics supervisors and potential employers will often look for public code written by the applicant to check their experience level beyond what is in their CV.

Only six students entered the competition in 2022, although I suspect this small uptake was a result of too high a workload and too short a timeframe. However, two entries were very good. One student wrote a program to automatically send him alerts of stock price changes and the winning entry was a joint project from two students who worked on a data analysis project for some astronomical data. Their code is publicly available here. Although I'd like to see more entries, the competition allowed an opportunity for passionate students to express their creativity, push themselves and hopefully learn more about what potential career they may enjoy. The pictures below show the winning students hard at work on their project (left) and proudly holding their certificates (right).

Infusion of technologies

UWC's Institutional Operating Policy (2016-2020) includes a statement that "UWC will promote enhanced learning opportunities through the innovative use of emerging technologies." During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to adopt new technologies was paramount for student success. I still find many of the same technologies very useful now that we are back in person. I make use of the following tools:

Above and on the right, I show an example resource I developed and placed on the iKamva site. I found most introductory programming videos make several assumptions on students’ initial understanding of what programming is (which may be close to no understanding at all). I made this video but it is an example of a resource which may be of great use to some students and completely unnecessary for others. The flipped approach allows students to learn what they need, when they need it and at their own pace.

Interactive quiz tools

I make use of Mentimeter and AhaSlides to interact with students. This was critical during the pandemic as students tended to keep their cameras off and feel uncomfortable with voicing questions. I use these tools to ask short quizzes during class to both check their understanding and also help challenge misconceptions. When marking the assignments, I look out for questions that the majority of students struggle with, which usually indicates a misconception of some kind. Then I structure a quiz around this in class which students can answer anonymously. This could be multiple choice or even getting them to write short code snippets. I find that by first getting them to answer a quiz, and then explaining why the answer is right usually results in better learning than just explaining without a quiz. I check this by asking similar questions the next week to see if the misconception has been resolved.

I also use these tools as a means for students who suffer some amount of social anxiety to ask questions anonymously. I find many people in the modern world are more comfortable typing than speaking up. There can also be an element of cultural divide which can make students nervous to ask lecturers questions out loud. When I first implemented the option of asking anonymous questions, I discovered that the number of questions asked during class increased dramatically. I always give the students the option in class to request I go through some of the questions from the practicals to show them how to solve it and improve their problem-solving skills.

References

• E. Mazur. 1997. Peer Instruction: A User's Manual, Pp. 253. Prentice Hall. Publisher's Version

• Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: reach every student in every class every day. Washington, DC: International Society for Technology in Education.